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The D & H Canal: An Engineering
and Entrepreneurial Challenge
The Delaware and Hudson Canal was a 108-mile, man-made waterway, an engineering
feat of pre-industrial America that brought a new form of energy from the
hills of Pennsylvania out to the Hudson River. From 1828 to 1898, mules pulled
barges laden with anthracite coal along river valleys from Honesdale in
northeastern Pennsylvania to Eddyville on the Rondout Creek near the villages
of Kingston and Rondout. From here, it was shipped on barges down the Hudson
to New York City and up the river to Canada.
The canal was conceived in 1823 by William and Maurice Wurts, two Philadelphia
dry goods merchants who had purchased large tracts of land in northeastern
Pennsylvania rich in anthracite coal deposits. Though the British had been
supplying America's fledgling industries on the eastern seaboard with bituminous
coal, the War of 1812 caused America's supply to be cut off, creating a crisis.
The Wurts brothers recognized New York City's need for a new source of cheap
energy and believed that their anthracite coal was the answer to the problem.
However, a reliable method of transportation had to be found and a market
created, for anthracite had not previously been taken seriously and many
doubted its ability to burn efficiently.
They hired Benjamin Wright, Chief Engineer of the newly created 350-mile
Erie Canal, to survey and design a canal out to the Hudson. The canal proposed
would be four feet deep, 32 feet wide, contain 108 locks, 137 bridges, 26
basins, dams, and reservoirs, and cost an estimated 1.2 million dollars.
In contrast to the state-financed Erie Canal, the D & H Canal was begun
with private money.
To raise money and interest in the project, the Wurts brothers arranged for
a demonstration. On January 7, 1825, the business leaders of New York City
gathered at the Tontine Coffee House on Wall Street to witness for the first
time the glow of anthracite fire that was to shape the industrial and domestic
development of the city. The stock offered for sale that day was oversubscribed
within a few hours, and the newly-formed Delaware & Hudson Canal Company
became America's first million-dollar private enterprise.
The Canal operated successfully until the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company
made a unique transition in 1898 into a railroad company, becoming America's
oldest continously operating transportation company. |
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